Research
There are numerous opportunities for undergraduate involvement in neuroscience research. These opportunities include independent study, work-study, summer research positions, and volunteer research arrangements. The Program Office maintains a listing of faculty members who welcome undergraduate participants in their laboratories. This list can provide suggestions to the student attempting to identify research opportunities. Consultation with one of the UNP Co-Directors is a further source of guidance. Formal course credit for Independent Study is arranged through either the Biology or the Psychology Department.
The first step in getting involved in a research project is to define what your specific areas of interest are and locate a faculty member who conducts the kind of research in which you would be most interested. Neuroscience research at Duke comprises a wide range of techniques and levels of analyses. Which of these is most interesting to you? Would you like to perform behavior experiments with humans or animals? Would you like to conduct imaging studies of humans performing perceptual or cognitive tasks? Are you more interested in analyzing cellular mechanisms neural communication? Each of these approaches is represented by faculty here at Duke. Think carefully about what type of daily laboratory activities would be most interesting to you. Then, search through the research interests of the faculty associated with the UNP. A list of the faculty can be found on this page. Review the research interests of the faculty from their affiliated departmental web pages. The last step is to contact the faculty member either by email or phone, and simply inquire whether current undergraduate research opportunities exist in the lab. (Hint: Read one of the lab's most recent publications and comment on it. It will impress your potential advisor.)
Other research-related resources include the Undergraduate
Research Support Office, located in 04 Allen Building.
Publishing Your Research
Once you have conducted research in a laboratory, you should try to get it published! Of course if you collect high-quality data, then your advisor will want to work with you on publishing it in a top journal. Typically, you will work with your advisor on the preparation of the manuscript, and your advisor will decide on the appropriate journal to which you should submit the paper.
However, if your experiments didn't come out quiet as cleanly as you would have liked, and the data would not be publishable in a major journal, then there are a couple of other exciting options available to you. First, try submitting your work to our own undergraduate journal "The Duke Mind." This publication was recently revived and accepts articles describing undergraduate research activities here at Duke. Second, the University of South Carolina has recently created a journal titled "Impulse." This journal is specifically designed for the publication of undergraduate research in the neurosciences! For more information on submitting undergraduate research to Impulse, see this page.